In the medical field it is critical to maintain sanitary conditions in order to prevent the spread of bacteria from one patient to another, or cross infect patients. This is particularly true when dealing with women's health issues and endoscopies which require the use of lubricating fluid or gel to examine the patient. These lubricants come in large tubes and also in small single use foil packets.
However, large tubes contain much more lubricant than required for a single examination, while the smaller packets typically do not contain enough lubricant, requiring the physician's assistant to repeatedly open the packets for the physician which is a time consuming and cumbersome process. Moreover, once the physician's hand touches the end of a tube, that tube becomes contaminated and may not be used on other patients, thus wasting the remaining contents of the tube and thus inventory.
A typical hospital may remove from inventory as many as eighty tubes of lubricant per day, most of which is not actually used, but rather is unused and destroyed as a result of contamination of the tube as mentioned above.